The most common bottleneck to fast internet protocol (IP) routing processors resides in having a fast and efficient IP searching method and to speed up forwarding operations. Typical IP search engines and network address processors provide a single central routing table such as provided by the Internet Protocol Routing Processor, IPRP-V4 and its associated family of Internet Protocol Routing Processor, provided by Alliance Semiconductor of Santa Clara, Calif. The IPRP family of network address processors operate at a typical frequency of 66 MHz and upon receipt of a given 32-bit wide destination address, the network address processor searches its central lookup table for a matching entry, i.e., an entry matching the largest number of higher order bits of the destination address according to the CIDR protocol. When greater than 16-bits addressing is required for routing an IP packet, a 16-bit output from the network address processor is used as a pointer to an external memory for further address matching searching. Accessing an external memory consequently adds to processing time and cost.
Thus, with the ever increasing and escalating consumer demand and usage of internet applications there is a need for a network address processor to handle faster and greater network address routing requirements to avoid internet traffic bottlenecks.